As a horrific plague rages through the city, turning its victims into frenzied, self-destructive shells of their former selves, grieving widower Jay seeks refuge in his family’s department store alongside his estranged young daughter, Olivia, and several disgruntled employees. With the infection closing in and paranoia escalating within the group, Jay and Olivia are forced into a harrowing battle for survival.
Grimmfest Says: A tour-de-force from Writer-Director-Lead Actor Bari Kang, ITCH brilliantly reboots and reinvents the classic single-location “the apocalypse is raging outside, and we could all be infected already” scenarios much loved by shows such as THE TWILIGHT ZONE & THE OUTER LIMITS. The essential set up is a kind of “DAWN OF THE DEAD in miniature”, with the sprawling mall replaced by a family-owned Mini-Mart. But the smaller scale of the location only adds to the claustrophobic pressure cooker tension, while the film’s uncomfortable and unsettling depiction of the insidious progress of the infection calls to mind Bruce McDonald and Tony Burgess’s 2008 cult classic, PONTYPOOL. The end result is a suffocatingly tense movie, with a strong emotional core, which takes its time to establish the various characters, give each of them light and shade and motivation, to make us care about them, before everything goes to hell. And which pulls absolutely no punches in its bleak, devastating climax. It’s one that will really get under your skin.